Sanders didn’t win the White House but he did help build a progressive-populist movement that will outlive 2016.

What an amazing Democratic primary season it was!

And we now have this happy result: WE WON!

‘We’ being the millions of young people – mad-as-hell working stiffs – independents – deep-rooted progressives and other ‘outsiders’ who felt The Bern and forged a new game-changing populist force of – by and for grassroots Americans.

True – this progressive-populist coalition did not win the White House on its first go ’round behind the feisty Sanders insurgency (which the the smug political establishment had literally laughed at when he began his run).

But they are not laughing now – for even they can see the outsider revolt against the power elites won something even more momentous than the 2016 election: The future.

Back in April 2015 when the blunt democratic socialist from Vermont issued a call for disenchanted voters to join him – not merely in a campaign for the presidency but in a long-term movement to ‘revitalize American democracy so that government works for all of us’ even his more optimistic backers couldn’t have dreamed the movement would come so far so quickly.

Let’s reflect on some fundamental changes this progressive uprising has achieved in the past 15 months: